Trinity House Calendars 1787-1854


Introduction
Trinity House was responsible for the supervision of lighthouses round the English coast, and also distributed charitable funds to disabled seamen and their families.

Most of the papers are Petitions for aid, submitted by the seaman or, often, his widow. Other papers include Apprenticeship Indentures of seamen, and a collection of Miscellaneous papers, consisting mainly of marriage and baptismal certificates. The papers cover families from all over the United Kingdom.

The calendars are available online as digitised images of the printed version. The entries are all in alphabetical order, and the surname index, which covers all three indexes, allows you to retrieve and display all pages which have entries relevant to the surname you are searching.

Hard copies of the original papers can be ordered online.


Trinity House
The ancient Corporation of Trinity House was responsible for the supervision of lighthouses and buoys around England. Under the terms of its Charter of Incorporation granted in 1514 it was concerned also with the distribution of charitable funds which had been entrusted to it by many benefactors, for the benefit of poor disabled seamen and their widows and orphans.

Before the passing of the Mercantile Marine Act of 1854, the Corporation had at its disposal for charitable purposes not only the revenue from their trust properties, but also the annual surplus from light dues. When necessary, the Corporation did not hesitate to augment its charities by large donations from its private or corporate income. The Corporation was thus able to relieve an enormous number of distressed mariners. In consequence of the abolition in 1854 of its right to administer the surplus money received from light dues, its charities were greatly curtailed.

Great care was always taken by Trinity House to see that its charitable funds were carefully disbursed and every mariner or his dependent applying for help was required to give full particulars of his or her circumstances. These forms of application were known as 'Petitions'. It is impossible to say when they were first in use, but some sort of petition must have existed from the earliest days of the Corporation. Even before the Charter of 1514 it possessed almshouses at Deptford, Kent, for the benefit of distressed mariners and subsequently it acquired further almshouses at Mile End, London.


Trinity House Calendars
The great majority of the Trinity House papers are Petitions, with related documents, but there are two other separate collections of papers: Apprentice Indentures and Miscellaneous Papers. All these papers are included in the calendars, and a searchable surname index covers all three collections. Note that the surname index includes all surnames which appear in the calendar records, not just the surname under which the index record appears, so you will be able to find documents which refer to persons with different surnames from that of the person which the papers relate directly to.


Ordering hard copies
You can order hard copies of nearly all the calendared documents (all except Miscellaneous Papers indexed under M-Z). This is simply a matter of completing and submitting a form which is displayed on the screen. The hard copies will be sent to you by the Society of Genealogists.

Each document or set of documents (there is often more than one) relating to a calendar entry costs £10.


Calendar of Petitions
About 8,000 petitions are calendared, by petitioner. This is usually the wife or widow, but is often the seaman himself. The year of the petition, the petitioner's age, in most cases the spouse's name, and the place they are living is shown.

Example of Petition Calendar record:


Calendar of Apprentice Indentures
186 Apprenticeship Indentures of seamen from the periods 1780 and 1818-1845 are calendared. Most of the indentures have endorsements as to their enrolment and the completion of the terms. Many are also endorsed with notes of money advanced and paid.

Example of Apprentice Indenture Calendar record:


Calendar of Miscellaneous Papers
The "Miscellaneous Almshouse and Pension Papers", which consist mainly of baptismal and marriage certificates, seem to have been removed from files relating to pension and almshouse applications made to Trinity House between about 1790 and 1890. The great majority relate to applications made in the period 1830-1880, with 30% made in the 1870s, though the certificated themselves date from the mid-18th century. In some cases the petitions and supporting documents have survived and are attached; in others it is clear that only a fraction of the formerly existing records has been retained. It is not known why this particular selection of the records has survived. The dates of extraction of the certificates have been included as giving clues to the dates of the pension applications. About 400 sets of papers are calendared.

Example of Miscellaneous Papers Calendar record:


Note that all surnames present in the calendar records are included in the surname index. So the page containing the above records will be found under HANCOCK, JONES, HARDING and HOPE.


The original documents

Petitions
In nearly every case the Petitions follow a stereotyped formula, as the forms contain a printed set of questions which are to be answered by the applicant. The following Petition of Ann Bell in January, 1848, may be taken as a representative example:

To the Honorable the Master, Wardens and Assistants, of the Corporation of Trinity-House of Deptford-Strond. The humble Petition of Ann Bell, aged forty six years, residing at Queen Street, Whitehaven, Widow of John Bell,

Sheweth,

That your Petitioner's Husband went to Sea at the Age of 15 in the Year 1820 and was employed in the Merchant Sea Service for 27 Years, in the following Ships, and others, and in the annexed Stations:
Year Ship or
Vessel's Name		 Register Tonnage Station on board From what Place,
to what Place
1820 William of 158 tons Apprentice From Whitehaven
to Dublin
1825 do. do. Mate do.
1832 do. do. Master do.
1848
up to death		 Ceres 150 tons Mate do.
That your Petitioner's Husband on the 16th day of January, 1848, went on board the last named vessel early in the morning to get her into a proper Berth in the Whitehaven Harbour and the Hatches having been left off he fell into [the] Hold and was killed on the place, and she has 5 Children, viz. 2 Boys under 12 Years of Age, and 3 Girls under 14 Years of Age, viz.
CHILDREN'S NAMES DATE OF CHILDREN'S BIRTH
Dorothy born 25th February 1835
William born 12 Novr 1837
Ann born 10 May 1840
Lancelot born 3 August 1842
Mary Ann born 2 July 1846
That your Petitioner has no Annual Income from Real or Personal Property. That your Petitioner's Means of Support are from her Friends, she being in a delicate state of health which not being sufficient to support herself and Family, she most humbly prays that she or her Children may be admitted to the Pension of this Corporation.

Your Petitioner will ever pray, &c.,
Ann Bell X her mark
Dated 25th January 1848.

On the other side of this Petition are certificates, one signed by the owner of the ship in which John Bell last served, another by a Medical Practitioner saying that Ann Bell is "incapable of gaining her livelihood", and the third by "two respectable Persons" (in this case six Whitehaven shipowners sign) vouching for the truth of the Petition. Then follow five certificates of baptism of the children signed by the Curate of St James, Whitehaven, a certificate of the marriage of John Bell and Ann (formerly Dobson), at the same church, and five birth certificates of the children, on one of which the informant is "John Bell of Whitehaven, Master of the House of Correction, in attendance and grandfather of the infant". The Petition is endorsed "4s.6d." and dated 14th February, 1848. This means that the Petitioner was granted that amount monthly from the date stated.

Naturally every Petition varies in the amount of information given, and also the number of documents enclosed in support of the Petitioner's claims, but as the period covered by them includes the whole of the Napoleonic Wars, there is a tremendous amount of valuable genealogical information about many seamen who either fought or were taken prisoner during those times.


Further information
Unfortunately the records of Trinity House suffered severely by fire in 1666 and 1714 and the balance was almost totally destroyed by bombing in 1940. Providentially in 1934 the Corporation of Trinity House had presented to the Society of Genealogists all the Petitions for assistance then surviving and covering the period from 1787 to 1854.

At some time in the eighteenth century the first Petitions had been given a serial letter A, and were numbered from 1 to 10,000. They were entered into Pension Pay Books where all details as to the rates of pay, etc, were recorded. All the Petitions in Series A have perished, and although the Pay Books survived from 1775 and contained details of Petitioners from A2547 onwards, these too were destroyed in 1940.

All the Petitions until B4001 dated 1 February, 1787, have also disappeared but from that date the Society has an apparently complete run to 1854. The Petitions were originally filed in bundles in numerical order in their respective years, but they were opened out by the Society, placed in rough alphabetical order, and then bound into 102 volumes. For some unknown reason an additional group of Petitions, covering a similar period was put to one side at the Society and not traced until 1970 when it also was bound into eleven volumes. All these documents, after having been microfilmed, were deposited by the Society at the Guildhall Library, London.

A brief description of the records, by E.P. Stapleton, appears in "The Genealogists' Magazine", vi, 490-492 (1934), and another, by D.E. Gardner and F. Smith in "Genealogical Research in England and Wales", ii, 181-182 (1959).

Further information on Trinity House and its records, now stored at the Guildhall Library, London, is available at www.history.ac.uk/gh/thouse.htm and www.history.ac.uk/gh/thouse2.htm


Acknowledgements
The text published here concerning the Trinity House Paper and Calendars is an edited version of the introduction prepared by Anthony J. Camp for the printed version of the booklet on Trinity House Petitions published by the Society of Genealogists in 1987.

The Calendar of Petitions was made by Mr A.D. D'Ews in 1987, subsequently corrected by Mrs I. Charlton, and retyped for publication by Mr Charles V. Porter.

Anthony Camp generated the calendars of Apprentice Indentures and of the Miscellaneous Papers, and also compiled the composite index of surnames for the Society of Genealogists, which has been computerised by The Origins Network.

© 2005 Society of Genealogists, Anthony Camp, The Origins Network


See also:  Help on Searching - Trinity House Calendars
  Source record archives
  Logged in users search the collection

Presented in association with the Society of Genealogists www.sog.org.uk